Families and the Law in Canada: Cases and Commentary by Mary Jane Mossman

Abstract

Calder reviews Families and the Law in canada: Cases and Commentary by Mary Jane Mossman.

It is hard to imagine a current textbook in family law that could meet the needs of law teachers and students from one end of the country to the other. The most apparent challenge is that family law is a complicated issue jurisdictionally given that, as a constitutional matter, the majority of family law falls within provincial jurisdiction. At a more theoretical level, family law encompasses every area of human diversity requiring sensitive discussion of issues of gender, race, class, religion, sexual orientation, disability and the intersections of all of these areas. It is also an area in which there has been phenomenal change in recent years from emerging new reproductive technologies that confront issues of biology within the family, to alternative dispute models that challenge the way that conflicts within family law are addressed in practice, to the fundamental change to the definition of marriage resulting from the legalization of same-sex marriage. Unless it were able to spontaneously edit itself, it is hard to envision a textbook that keeps pace.